Jolie Holland has always embodied everything weird and wonderful in the history of American music, but Wine Dark Sea takes it to a new level. Raw and unrestrained, bristling with kinetic energy, Wine Dark Sea is unlike anything she’s ever recorded, but is also the purest and most assured evocation of Holland’s vision to date. A joyfully unrestrained masterwork, the record delivers: louder, noisier, raw and visceral. It is an inventive and fiery reimagining of delta blues, free jazz, classic r&b and country, infused throughout with a no wave abandon.

Over the span of her career, Jolie Holland has knotted together a century of American song – jazz, blues, soul, rock and roll – into some stew that is impossible to categorize with any conventional critical terminology. She thrives on the red hot center of a musical composition, in all its strange and brutal detail. Note how easily the line ‘I’ve been taken outside and I’ve been brutalized’ trips off her tongue in Joe Tex’s ‘The Love You Save’. Which brings us to the album ‘Wine Dark Sea’. Astute listeners to Holland’s work can recognize how her writing over the years has deepened, matured, become the songwriting of a wise, worldly adult, not just of a rambler across the American latitudes, but to understand this is still no preparation for the sonic assault, the unprecedented confidence and merciless brilliance of Wine Dark Sea which yokes the New York underground to American song in a way that has rarely been attempted since White Light/White Heat by the Velvet Underground. Two drummers, sometimes as many as three or four electric guitars, horns of a sort that come out of free jazz and the No Wave scene as much as they come from soul music, and a refreshing need, on Holland’s part, to sing out at the extreme of her range, above the squalling insatiable lullaby of the thing. Wine Dark Sea is the album of a lifetime with a lifetime of work in it.

Tracklist:
01 – On and On
02 – First Sign of Spring
03 – Dark Days
04 – Route 30
05 – I Thought It Was the Moon
06 – The Love You Save
07 – All the Love
08 – Saint Dymphna
09 – Palm Wine Drunkard
10 – Out On the Wine Dark Sea
11 – Waiting for the Sun